Piece of shit software - Crappy software/apps/programs that make you MATI

[Falcos_Commisar]

You're making me have horrible flashbacks to when I had to deal with it for Biostatistics. The program was absolutely horrible, and I almost got fucked over on my midterm because it refused to work half the time.

Argh I used to support our corporate SPSS install/license years ago

IBM helpfully changed the URL that the license called home to without warning one day and killed our SPSS license for a week while we talked with IBM support. Eventually I found the issue on a forum thread and fixed it.

Join the mpv master race.

Ah, you mean the MPC-BE master race.

 

[HarblMcDavid]

This is probably a blast from the past, but the Adobe CS6 Master Collection installer and app manager SPECIFICALLY are a massive piece of shit for piece of software costing over $6000 for a license.

First off, if you install it while you have a newer version Adobe READER installed, it will not install the full version of Acrobat if you have a newer version of reader.

This may seem like not an issue for a clean system install, but chances are you aren't installing this on a clean system, nobody gets away without a PDF reader on windows, and there's a very good chance you're getting the newest version of reader which within even a couple years of release of CS6 master would result in a newer version of Adobe reader on most windows systems.

But if it stopped there, that'd be one thing. It gets worse.

It doesn't TELL YOU WHY it didn't install the software unless you hunt down an install log, it just says "we installed all this!" with no Acrobat icon present, and the entry in Add/Remove Programs will simply have a "6" (I think it was 6, it was a single number) as the subtitle with zero explanation of what that means. It turns out that's the error code for "we didn't install everything" but come the fuck on, this is a $6000 piece of software and Acrobat is a nontrivial chunk of it. It's very easy to miss that Acrobat never installed, and you then need to reinstall the whole thing to get it installed if you fucked it up.

...that's just related to Acrobat though, CS6 gets better!

The application manager that automatically updates itself too far in TYOL 2023, and then finds does find updates but will LIE TO YOU ABOUT THEM BEING INSTALLED. It will suggest to you it installed all the updates, but if you check the versions of the software it updates, it seems to have not actually updated them at all, they're all still major version no minor version.

Remember this was a piece of software costing over $6000, and it had those issues with Acrobat not installing while it was current software.

 

[Wood]

"try out Office 365!" (it does this randomly 2 times a week AFAIK)

TRY OUT NEW OFFICE
TRY OUT NEW BING
TRY OUT NEW OUTLOOK
TRY OUT NEW ONENOTE
WINDOWS DEFENDER EXISTS AND IS DOING FUCK ALL SHOW LESS NOTIFICATIONS?

fucking kill yourself

 

[Absolutego]

Today I learned that the Microsoft Store version of Office 365 and the version you download from their website and install manually don't share the same user account tracking system. Trying to sign in on the one with an account that works for the other will generate an "account does not exist" error.
Which is so, classically, confusingly incompetent on Microsoft's part. Really, they diverge based on how you install it? Why is that even remotely dependent on the installation method instead of siloed out into its own thing?
And they constantly shill that people switch to the Store version of all of their nonsense (probably because they have more tracking, knowing Microsoft), so it's even in their interest to make that shit work properly.
Redmond is a city full of utter clowns.

 

[std::string]

Argh I used to support our corporate SPSS install/license years ago

IBM helpfully changed the URL that the license called home to without warning one day and killed our SPSS license for a week while we talked with IBM support. Eventually I found the issue on a forum thread and fixed it.

Well we all know things like this happen to small indie developers like...IBM.

At least SPSS is likely on its way out. Social science statistics courses seem to be switching to R since SPSS shits itself so bad on large data sets.

 

[guiltyspark85]

I use SPSS daily and I'd ditch it if I could, but unfortunately I'm sent a lot of SPSS data files. I only use SPSS for some fairly rudimentary data management tasks such data checks and merging data files together. But then I'll import the data file into other software for analysis.

Dealing with IBM is a nightmare. At my old workplace we just purchased copies outright and didn't bother upgrading as there were never any new features we'd need. One time I re-installed it on a colleagues new computer and it gave me an error saying the maximum number of activations had been exceeded. I contacted IBM to ask them to reset the activations and they tried telling me I'd need to purchase a new licence. Fortunately, they relented and reset the activations. But they had a real arsehole attitude about it telling me it wasn't something they'd normally do.

When I started my own business, I'm pretty sure rather than simply being able to get one through their web site I had to call IBM to get a licence. They were an absolute pain about the requirements for proving I had a registered business. I'd provided them with the documentation they requested, but they came back and said I also needed a web site with business details on it. At the time, my web site was simply a blank page and I wasn't advertising it in my email signature, so I guess they grabbed my email domain and had a look. I went back to them and told them my business was a week old, and I simply hadn't had the time to set up a web site, but if they REALLY need me to have a web site, I'll create a very basic page with only the details they need. They relented and said they'll make an exception.

At the moment, I'm on a month-by-month subscription. So every month they send me three emails in quick succession for the renewal. One time their system broke and they flooded my inbox with the same email. It was also mildly annoying when my credit card expired and trying to find where I needed to update the details since they have several different portals, but didn't specify where I needed to go. So required a bit of hunting.

I have looked at the GNU SPSS clone PSPP over the years, but the GUI was pretty buggy, at least on Windows, and otherwise seemed very bare bones. So for the moment, I think I'm stuck with SPSS.

 

[Slav Power]

Join the mpv master race.

Wow, I love wasting hours going through the program's documentation to figure out how to configure it because it doesn't have a configuration UI, you have to configure everything through a text config file, and the devs won't bother making a default config file with every default configuration in it, with comment blocks explaining what the settings do.

DOSBox has a default config file with comments, Xenia has a default config file with comments, Keypirinha has a default config file with comments, but no, not mpv, because the devs of that are such massive Linux turbo autists they truly believe that the most user unfriendly UI and configuration via empty config files where the user has to figure every single thing out themselves is the """normal""" way to do things.

Meanwhile I can just install K-Lite Codec Pack, use MPC-HC that comes with it, configure it through a very simple UI, and enjoy all my shit in great quality with very good performance.

 

[Womble of Wimbledon]

I was using someone else's computer and had to use Adobe acrobat to read a pdf, and I just thought, wow, people still use this shit? It took like 30 seconds just to boot up before drip-feeding me the pdf I wanted in 10 second intervals. I have used SumatraPDF for so long I forgot how shitty Acrobat was.

 

[Car Won't Crank]

Well we all know things like this happen to small indie developers like...IBM.

At least SPSS is likely on its way out. Social science statistics courses seem to be switching to R since SPSS shits itself so bad on large data sets.

Forget social statistics. Many general statistics courses are teaching using R. The open source and free nature of it and many pages of support and tutorials online make it way more accessible. I wonder what IBM will do to bribe instructors and institutions to try and maintain their grip on the market.

 

[Miller]

I hate how Firefox is the default browser on most Linux distros. When it launches for the first time you get a picture of some dyke welder, then a drawing of a black woman (why not a cute animal like the red panda?) and if you open a new tab you get ads for Amazon, Google, Ebay, etc.
LibreWolf should be the default. Not only there's no ad for the corporations but it also comes with uBlock Origin.

 

[Absolutego]

Another hilarious case of Microsoft essentially being the corporate version of an epileptic with their corpus callosum cut:

There is a difference between Microsoft Defender Firewall and Windows Defender Firewall, the latter being the legacy implementation pre-Windows 8. You can have the Microsoft one show the firewall as off but the Windows one as on. But when Intune checks for compliance, even though it says it checks the Microsoft firewall tool in the UI, it's actually checking the Windows one.

Spent a good half-hour today helping out a coworker trying to figure out why all the devices he was testing kept coming up as non-compliant.

 

[Lone Wandering Courier]

I hate how Firefox is the default browser on most Linux distros. When it launches for the first time you get a picture of some dyke welder, then a drawing of a black woman (why not a cute animal like the red panda?) and if you open a new tab you get ads for Amazon, Google, Ebay, etc.
LibreWolf should be the default. Not only there's no ad for the corporations but it also comes with uBlock Origin.

Ultimatly it comes down to the fact that most distros want to attract normies and not scare them off. At least, that's my assumption. Librewolf doesn't have the same name recongnition plus some websites don't work right with librewolf and even trying to change settings in aboutconfig didn't help much.

 

[Colon capital V]

Bro holy SHIT, why the fuck do these kike ass jew faggot plugin music companies have to require me to install these shitty ass liscensing programs for free stuff?
Okay so I was downloading a free saturation plugin from Softube, they have me try and create an account and all that. No big deal, that's what throwaway emails are for. Then when I was installing it, they ask me to create an ilok account for liscensing. Okay kinda sketchy but whatever. THEN when I was implementing the plugin into my DAW, they have me install this "PACE" liscencing program just to prove that yes I am in fact NOT pirating this plugin even though it's FUCKING FREE. At that point I just said fuck it, I'm pirating this shit instead because somehow installing it from crackers feels WAY less like I'm getting virtual STDs than if I was getting it from the official fucking company itself.
And wow, according to the .nfo from R2R (the people who cracked this plugin), it apparently loads faster and uses less ram than the official plugin. I hope these faggot kikes slips and falls on a glass shart through their throats. Fuck them, I'm pirating the rest of their plugins in the future if I decide to do so.
Same shit with this other VST, Fresh Air, has to have me install POZZed liscencing programs or else I can't use it. DRM and it's consequences have been a disaster for the computer consumer,
REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

 

[Gender: Xenomorph]

Antivirus in general.

Stopped doing their job, now they're bloatware/adware with annoying popups on top.

 

[whogoesthere]

MSI Afterburner and whatever it is based on is using that horrible chink UI that they used for motherboard related software in the early 2000s. It's like a Kai Krause nightmare. JDownloader and Media Downloader(both are non CLI Youtube-DLP alternatives) also have very mysterious design choices.

Every time I use JDownloader I feel like an Indian scammer. It would look perfect on an XP desktop.

 

[Lone Wandering Courier]

Not really specific software, but the general trend of making everything flat and ugly and taking away useful and basic parts of a UI and replacing it with a fucking hamburger menu. It all almost makes me want to switch desktop environments and switch to the chicago95 theme.

 

[newuser131]

my AVG antivirus keep blocking sneed.today url. said it was on a blacklist. is this the new strategy for censorship for software to block websites now? has anyone else ran into this issue?

 

[Markass the Worst]

my AVG antivirus keep blocking sneed.today url. said it was on a blacklist. is this the new strategy for censorship for software to block websites now? has anyone else ran into this issue?

Don't use antivirus. 99% of an antivirus can be replaced by being smart and not clicking on suspicious links.

 

[newuser131]

i think the bigger issue is the software blocking websites you visit. i can see alleged rapist liz fong jones going to these tech web browsers to block kf or other undesirable sites. if that happens, its over for the clear net. you will only see what "they" want you to see.

can the tor browser, itself, block you from visiting any site?

 

[306h4Ge5eJUJ]

can the tor browser, itself, block you from visiting any site?

Any browser can, in theory, refuse to visit certain sites. Considering the target audience of Tor, this would pretty much amount to suicide though, and for open-source projects, it'd be a matter of minutes before ways to bypass this come out.

I suppose one thing that could happen is that Tor relays (the servers that make up the Tor network) refuse to connect to KF's hidden service; I don't remember the specifics of the Tor protocol well enough to remember whether this is possible. Even if it was possible, it'd be a very easy cat-and-mouse game to win on KF's side.